The investigators told Mr Kim in a letter they were advising the United Nations to refer North Korea to the International Criminal Court, to make sure any culprits "including possibly yourself" were held accountable.

The unprecedented public rebuke and warning to a head of state by a UN inquiry is likely to further antagonise Mr Kim and complicate efforts to persuade him to rein in his isolated country's nuclear weapons program and belligerent confrontations with South Korea and the West.

North Korea "categorically and totally" rejected the accusations set out in a 372-page report, saying they were based on material faked by hostile forces backed by the United States, the European Union and Japan.

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UN Commission of Inquiry chairman Michael Kirby said he expected his group's findings to "galvanise action on the part of the international community".

"These are not the occasional wrongs that can be done by officials everywhere in the world, they are wrongs against humanity, they are wrongs that shock the consciousness of humanity," Mr Kirby, a former High Court judge in Australia, told journalists.

Referral to the Hague-based International Criminal Court is seen as unlikely given China's probable veto of any such move in the UN Security Council, diplomats said.

"Another possibility is establishment of an ad hoc tribunal like the tribunal on the former Yugoslavia," Mr Kirby said.

The UN investigators also told Mr Kim's main ally China that it might be "aiding and abetting crimes against humanity" by sending migrants and defectors back to North Korea to face torture or execution, a charge that Chinese officials dismissed.

The findings came out of a year-long investigation involving public testimony by defectors, including former prison camp guards, at hearings in South Korea, Japan, Britain and the US.

Defectors included Shin Dong-hyuk, who gave harrowing accounts of his life and escape from a prison camp. As a 13-year-old, he informed a prison guard of a plot by his mother and brother to escape and both were executed, a book on his life called Escape from Camp 14 recounts.

Mr Kirby said the crimes that the team had catalogued were reminiscent of those committed by Nazis during World War II.

"Some of them are strikingly similar," he said. "Testimony was given ... in relation to the political prison camps of large numbers of people who were malnourished, who were effectively starved to death and then had to be disposed of in pots, burned and then buried ... It was the duty of other prisoners in the camps to dispose of them."

The number of North Korean officials potentially guilty of the worst crimes would be "running into the hundreds", he said.

"The gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world," it said.

North Korea's diplomatic mission in Geneva dismissed the findings. "We will continue to strongly respond to the end to any attempt of regime change and pressure under the pretext of 'human rights protection'," it said.

The two-page North Korean statement, in English, said the report was an "instrument of a political plot aimed at sabotaging the socialist system" and defaming the country.

Violations listed in the document and forwarded to Pyongyang for comment several weeks ago "do not exist in our country".

The investigators said abuses were mainly perpetrated by officials in structures that ultimately reported to Mr Kim - state security, the Ministry of People's Security, the army, the judiciary and the Workers' Party of Korea.

"It is open to inference that the officials are, in some instances, acting under your personal control," Mr Kirby wrote in the three-page letter to Mr Kim published as part of the report.

The team recommended targeted UN sanctions against civil officials and military commanders suspected of the worst crimes. It did not reveal any names, but said it had compiled a database of suspects from evidence and testimony.

Pyongyang has used food as "a means of control over the population" and "deliberate starvation" to punish political and ordinary prisoners, the team of 12 investigators said.